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The global persecution of Christians is an urgent human rights issue that remains underreported. This volume presents the results of the first systematic global investigation into how Christians respond to persecution. World-class scholars of global Christianity present first-hand research from most of the sites of the harshest persecution as well as the West and Latin America. Their findings make clear the nature of persecution, the reasons for it, Christian responses to it - both non-violent and confrontational - and the effects of these responses. Motivating the volume is the hope that this knowledge will empower all who would exercise solidarity with the world's persecuted Christians and will offer the victims strategies for a more effective response. This book is written for anyone concerned about the persecution of Christians or more generally about the human right of religious freedom, including scholars, activists, political and religious leaders, and those who work for international organizations.

Not so very long ago, the idea of religious freedom enjoyed all the self-evident virtue of a Norman Rockwell painting. Sure, Americans disagreed about what it meant in practice, leaving their Supreme Court to hash out the details. Still, however Americans differed in their religious beliefs, they espoused religious freedom and insisted that it cannot be government's job to promote any one religious sect over others or coerce anyone's conscience in religious matters. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” thundered Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in 1943, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”1 For a time, this consensus seemed poised to embrace the entire world. When in November 1949 Eleanor Roosevelt proudly held up for public view a poster-size copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including its article on “freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” one might have been forgiven for thinking that all the peoples of the earth were ready to follow her matronly instruction.2

This chapter takes issue with the secular liberal narrative, which claims that liberal democracy could only emerge when politics was cast free from Christianity. Looking at the critical period of 1800–2000, when modern liberal democratic institutions saw their most rapid development, I argue that the secular liberal narrative merits sharp revision. In manifold manners and instances, Christians advanced political liberty during this period.

I make three claims in particular. First, throughout this period Christian thinkers and leaders advocated an expansion of liberty, whether that meant a widening of the franchise, the freeing of slaves, the toppling of dictatorships, or the legal guarantee of religious freedom. I demonstrate this with respect to eight Western countries in the period 1800–1970 and then on a global scale from 1970 to the present. I argue that Christian advocates of liberal democracy were ahead of their own regime and sometimes of their secular counterparts. Though I make no effort to compare the numbers and power of Christian advocates of liberal democracy with those of Christians who opposed liberal democracy, I argue that the advocates were numerous, often prominent, and of enduring historical significance.

Second, Christian advocates of liberal democracy during this period made their case on distinctive Christian grounds – reasons that they drew from the classic Christian tradition (and, in the Catholic case, were consistent with the enduring dogmatic teachings of the Catholic Church). That is, they did not simply come around to accepting theories of liberal democracy that others had developed without reference to God. Most of the figures that I examine in this essay were keen to differentiate their case for liberal democracy from that of the Enlightenment. They were Christian liberals, not liberal Christians.

Third, Christian liberals usually made their case in an atmosphere in which their own religious liberty was curtailed or assaulted. This varied, to be sure, with respect to the regime and the Christian church involved. Still, the curtailment was common and carries two implications. First, it helps to explain the stance of Christians who did not embrace liberalism. While many Christians’ rejection of liberalism arose from a yearning for the ancien régime, in other cases the refusal was a reaction to liberalism's own illiberalism, that is, an ironic hostility to religious freedom of otherwise liberal regimes.

The core proposition of this article is that reconciliation, both as a process and an end state, is a concept of justice. Its animating virtue is mercy and its goal is peace. These concepts are expressed most deeply in religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The idea of justice as right relationship is also found in the contemporary restorative justice movement, an approach to criminal justice that has emerged in the past generation.

For contemporary political orders addressing past war, genocide, and authoritarianism, the holistic justice of reconciliation involves not only the legal guarantee and actual practice of human rights and the laws of war but also a redress of the range of wounds that political injustices inflict. Reconciliation is achieved through a set of six political practices that seek to restore a measure of human flourishing. A secondary fruit of these practices is an increase in the legitimacy that citizens bequeath to their governing institutions or to their state's relationship with other states.

The article takes a close look at two of the practices that are often thought to be at odds in addressing past injustices—punishment and forgiveness—and argues that when viewed as practices that reflect and participate in a restorative concept of justice, punishment and forgiveness become compatible in principle—with important implications for the politics of facing past evil

Amitai Etzioni advances arguments about two forms of legitimacy, what I will call empirical legitimacy and substantive legitimacy. Empirical legitimacy is a matter of what people consider to be legitimate. It is assessed through the methods of social science—conducting surveys, for instance. Substantive legitimacy is a matter not of what people happen to think but of what is legitimate in the sense of being just or morally right. Etzioni's argument about empirical legitimacy, namely, that it is shaped through collective processes that involve emotions as well as reason, I find broadly plausible. Then he makes an argument about substantive legitimacy, one that explains how we are to know if an “act” (a term he uses broadly) is truly just or moral. This latter argument I wish to explore further and to raise questions about.

Over the past couple of decades, a historically unusual concatenation of societies – Germany, Rwanda, Guatemala, South Africa, and so many others – has confronted the injustices of their past, ranging from systematic authoritarian suppressions to the mass atrocities of communal conflict. Words and images persist: defiant dictators in the docket at the trial of the century (of which the last century featured many), relatives facing the killers of their kin at truth commissions, debates over reparations, and typically a surrounding clamor of charges and countercharges: victors' justice, no justice, stunted justice, retributive justice, perverted justice, restorative justice, injustice. Occasionally, the clamor has yielded a long awaited just verdict, a head of state's healing speech, or a genuine expression of repentance and forgiveness, moments where “hope and history rhyme,” in the words of Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

In these diverse scenes, one often descries miters, beards, clerical robes, pectoral crosses, or clusters of women chanting prayers. In the politics of transitional justice, religion is often, though not always, involved. Journalists and chroniclers sometimes have made much of this involvement, but not usually scholars, few of whom have sought to chart it systematically (exceptions are Graybill, 2001; Vinjamuri and Boesenecker, forthcoming). To be sure, theologians have written about the ethics of transitions, many of them urging reconciliation and forgiveness (de Gruchy, 2003; Schreiter, 1998; Volf, 1996).

This essay takes on the broad question—what explains the political pursuits of religious actors?—by exploring two powerful influences on these pursuits. The first is differentiation, or the degree of autonomy between religious actors and states in their basic authority. The second is political theology, the set of ideas that religious actors hold about political authority and justice. Through global comparisons across religions, regions, and states, it seeks to establish the effect of both influences on two political pursuits in which religion's role is hotly debated today: support for democratization and political violence, including communal violence and terrorism. It concludes with lessons learned commonly from the analysis of both pursuits.